


foregone conclusion

by misandrywitch



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Loosely based on, Modern Era, Mutual Pining, every vaguely chaotic dsa meeting i've ever attended, loosely described as "7 times e & r surprised one another", loosely set in, some nondescript city somewhere, we're here for kissing, who cares about plot or details
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 12:01:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19334131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: Enjolras wonders how it is that they’re always at cross-purposes, he and Grantaire.





	foregone conclusion

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "carin at the liquor store" by the national ("got taken by love, it wasn't that quick") 
> 
> i'm well aware that a) it's 2019. and b) every single other person on the planet has written their own 'kind of general modern au where these two characters figure it out or don't.' that's what this is. i couldn't help it but do one of my own. i don't care that it's been done & i will not be responsible for my actions & i have never met a plot in my entire life. 
> 
> if you know me... and you love me... don't look don't talk don't breathe in my direction. i'm going through something & it looks like this. also it's cait's fault - or mine, because i made them read les mis in 2019. so. email me NEVER i don't want to speak of this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.

 

 

Enjolras has already beat his escape, down two flights of stairs, out the door and onto the alley that separates Joly and Bossuet’s apartment building from the now-closed storefront next to it, when he realizes he doesn’t have a lighter on him.

He’s carrying a pack of cigarettes - an old habit from a younger time and the kind of talisman only a bad habit can be - but he hadn’t put the lighter in the pockets of his suit coat when they’d left that morning. It’s sitting in his bedside table. Unused, for the most part, but the kind of thing you have around when you’ve had a bad day, and nobody is there to watch you process it.

He has had a bad day. He’s walked out of the apartment - away from his friends, crammed in front of the television and arguing angrily over the kitchen island already strewn with opened bottles of wine - so nobody would have to watch him process it.

Enjolras sighs, slumps against the brick wall because there isn’t anyone to see his shoulders bend like that. It’s still hot, almost sticky, so he tugs his jacket off and searches one more time through the pockets. Still empty. He could walk back to his apartment, and smoke in secret on the fire escape so Combeferre wouldn’t notice the smell later. He could go back inside and clandestinely ask Feuilly, or even Eponine, for a light. He could walk across the street to the bodega and just buy one.

He could head off in a direction, any direction, and scream into the night.

The last option seems to be winning out, considering. But he’s tired.

He is about to stand up and leave - probably towards home, barring any awkward questions or expressions of dismay or sympathy from anybody upstairs - when someone comes in to the other end of the alley.

Courfeyrac is the most likely suspect to come after him, or maybe even Bossuet - but Enjolras turns to find an unmistakable and distinctive silhouette. A minute later, Grantaire leans one shoulder against the brick, looking off in the other direction like he’s surprised to find Enjolras standing out here by himself.

“If you’re about to say something clever,” Enjolras says first, because it’s been a long day, and tomorrow will be longer, and sometimes if you don’t beat Grantaire to the punch he’ll draw you into his game, “like how you were right, and you told us so, and nobody should hope for anything, don’t bother. Message received.”

Grantaire does look up at him for a moment, scrutinizing Enjolras from under the fringe of his hair and his dark eyebrows. He looks a little worse for wear but that’s not a sign, necessarily, of how he’s doing. He looks how Enjolras feels.

Enjolras wonders if this is how Grantaire feels, all the time.

“I came down here to see if you needed a light,” Grantaire says, and his eyes move away just as fast. Lately, Enjolras has been more conscious of their movement - where they land, how long they stay, how they get hard when he’s laughing at something he doesn’t really think is funny, and how they light up when he’s genuinely amused. He hasn’t allowed himself to think too much about what that means, the noticing.

“Why would I need a light?”

“You smoke,” Grantaire grins a little, with just the corner of his mouth, “when you’ve had a shitty day and you don’t want anyone else to know. Were you planning on having a shitty day?”

Enjolras yanks the carton of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, with a little more force than necessary. “I’m not unprepared, thanks.”

“You want a light, or not?”

“Please.”  

Enjolras has to bend over, a little, to meet the flame of Grantaire’s lighter, which he lights like an afterthought. Grantaire has to reach up, a little, to get his cigarette to catch. He lights his own, and they smoke in silence for a minute. Enjolras always feels subconscious about it. Grantaire looks slightly out of place without a cigarette in his mouth, and he slumps against the brick like there isn’t anything strange about this.

There’s something he should say to fill the silence - some kind of platitude or even the start of an argument. With anyone else, Enjolras would have known the right thing to say. Something reassuring, something honest. He’s never exactly sure, with Grantaire.

“I’m not entirely surprised,” he says, for some reason, “that the resolution didn’t pass. If that’s what you were asking. We always knew it was a long shot, but worth trying. It needed the support.”

Grantaire doesn’t say anything. He’s inscrutable in profile - nose, eyebrows, the lit tip of his cigarette. He pinches it between his thumb and forefinger so it’s half-hidden in his hand. Enjolras hadn’t met his eye when he and Combeferre had entered the crowded apartment a half an hour before. They’d all shown up that morning to sit through the first round of testimony, but the morning had dragged to afternoon, and then into evening. He and Combeferre had waited to hear the results. Everyone else had crammed themselves on Joly’s couch, and the reactions when he and Combeferre had walked into the apartment hadn’t been encouraging.

Tomorrow will be better, Enjolras promises himself. Tomorrow he will have the right thing to say, and again the day after that, and again as long as it takes.

He has to. There isn’t another option.

“And I didn’t come down here to gloat about the fact that, even when presented with an option to do literally anything else, humankind just keeps stepping in its own shit,” Grantaire says. Any other day and Enjolras would take the bait, engage him in an argument to stretch whatever histrionic point Grantaire feels like trying to make today. Any other day, it would probably make him feel better.

But he’s tired. So he just closes his eyes.

“Some things don’t change,” Grantaire is still talking. Always talking. “Like stepping in shit. Like me, being an ass. I am, I know, being an ass. But I really didn’t.”

With his eyes closed, Enjolras can pretend his voice turns sincere for a moment. Maybe he just wants it to. Maybe he’s really tired. The lights from the street make the inside of his eyelids dark red and blotchy, and suddenly he’s too aware of that feeling so he opens them again.

Grantaire isn’t looking at him, but Enjolras can’t shake the feeling that he was, a moment ago.

“What did you come down here to do, then?” He asks. He has no idea what he expects to hear in return.

“To see if you needed a light,” Grantaire says, and crushes the butt of his cigarette on the heel of his sneaker.

Enjolras wants to ask if he’d hoped, at all, that things might have gone well. He wants to ask why Grantaire had bothered to show up that morning, 9 am on a Saturday, if his expectations had been so low. He wants to ask if this is how Grantaire feels, all the time.

“Well,” he says, “thanks.”

“Anytime,” Grantaire flashes him a grin that’s all teeth and no sincerity, and Enjolras has missed something. “So, listen. Give it a half an hour, and the general aura of anguish despair upstairs will devolve into drunken despair, which is another half hour away from revelry. If you want to skip the journey and just get right to the end of where this night is headed.”

“You mean, it will if you have anything to say about it,” Enjolras says.

“Drunken despair is kind of my M.O.,” Grantaire agrees. “I won’t even comment if you down a few wine coolers. It’s been a shitty day.”

Enjolras can picture it - his friends in the crowded apartment, commiserating, making threats, making promises. Letting the fear boil over into anger, and then the anger into camaraderie and foolishness. It’s appealing, for a moment.

“I’ll save that for a night when the revelry is for a good reason,” he says, finally, and Grantaire nods, like he wasn’t expecting anything else.

“I’ll let you know when Bahorel takes his shirt off. Twenty five minutes, maybe.” And he turns to go, back up the stairs to the apartment, and light, and noise. A place he’s better suited to than this, Enjolras thinks, at the center of some kind of longwinded story or bawdy joke. But things had almost been going well.

Sometimes Enjolras feels like they’ve established a pattern, and they’re just rolling through the tracks of a path they’ve already tread before. It ends in this - Grantaire turning from him towards something else, and Enjolras looking past him towards the next thing. Grantaire - up the stairs and towards the party. Enjolras - towards the darkening street, and tomorrow.

“Goodnight, Grantaire,” he says.

They’ve done it once or a hundred times, and he puts his hands in his pockets with the expectation that they will, again. Like they always do.

“Well, here,” Grantaire says for some reason - and he’s got his lighter out again, finger over thumb until the flame dances. He’s lighting another cigarette. “Unless you’re in a hurry. One for the road?”

He exhales smoke. Enjolras takes it from him wordlessly, stopped by his own surprise.

“I’m not in a hurry,” he says. He doesn’t even think until he’s put it in his mouth that maybe that’s unhygienic, or too personal. Grantaire stares at the ground until he hands it back.

“You know what always makes me feel better,” Grantaire says, “when I’ve had a really shitty day?”

It’s such an unlikely thing for him to say that Enjolras can feel his own eyebrows climbing. “If you’re going to say ‘weed,’ or ‘falling off a bar counter,’ or ‘picking a fight with Enjolras,’ I can’t condone them,” he says. He snatches the joint out of Grantaire’s grip to punctuate his point.

“I do like all those things,” Grantaire shrugs, “but that’s not what I was thinking.”

“Then enlighten me.”

“Throwing a milkshake on a judge’s BMW,” Grantaire says promptly. Enjolras - again surprised - laughs. First he’s laughed all day, maybe.

“If you see one, point it out,” he says.

“That’s direct action,” Grantaire says, and he doesn’t go upstairs until the cigarette’s burned to nothing but the filter.

  
  
  
  
2.

 

 

They do bounce back, because they have to, and Enjolras avoids thinking about that moment of tenuous compromise for days by surrounding himself with work.

It’s his natural state, he’s always believed. It makes almost anything meaningful, and can put almost anything else into its place. He’s steadily worked his way towards and away from and in spite of many things. Moral quandaries, and his unstable relationship with his parents, and that feeling of fear when Courfeyrac and Combeferre had started dating that he’d be forgotten, somehow (that one had lasted a week, maybe less, and now he begs them both to stop accidentally inviting him to things that are supposed to be dates). They write letters and gather testimony and plan a sit-in. There are logistics, and interviews, and permits to ignore, and newsletters to send.

It’s in the edges though, when the work fades into exhaustion and the running to-do list fades to a litany of promises, and even that drops away, that he finds he’s still thinking about it. An inescapable fact. Staring at his ceiling at midnight, knowing in their living room Combeferre will be up for two more hours at least - there it is. The pause between collecting his thoughts and forming his words, looking at room full of collected faces - and again.

Grantaire, staring at the ground until Enjolras hands the cigarette back. He could have surrendered it and lit his own. He could have gone back inside. Enjolras turns over the detail until the memory feels grooved with misuse.

There are more moments like that than he’d readily admit, from the years they’ve known each other. In the space between things and the moments of breath, they’re easy to recall.

Like now, and like this -

They’re in the back room of the cafe, which has transitioned from serving espresso to alcohol in the time they’ve been posted up there. Frantic, last-minute planning has been cannibalised by some frantic, last-minute drinking - what might be fairly standard for a DSA meeting just turned up to eleven. There are a thousand more details to be determined and Enjolras could discuss them endlessly - but it won’t do any good, at this point, as they’re preparing for tomorrow morning. Liquid camaraderie is a better use of everyone’s time.

So - he’s sat back to watch and listen and absorb the moment. Courfeyrac has looped both Eponine and Cosette into some story, making them both laugh and Marius blush. Combeferre and Feuilly, on his left, are deep in discussion with their elbows propped on the bar counter. And Joly, Muschietta, Bossuet and Bahorel are grouped around the bar across the room.

At their center, Grantaire is pontificating.

In spite of himself, Enjolras tries to listen in from across the space, but whatever thread of story Grantaire has begun has long spun into something incomprehensible. He can’t figure out where to intersect it so he just watches as Bossuet pounds Grantaire on the back in laughter, his drink dangerously close to sloshing. Their laughter subsides, they catch each others’ eye and then it begins again - patterns of old comfortable friendship that Enjolras understands well, and likes watching in other people. Combeferre nudges him by the elbow, his own mind-reading other half, and they readjust their seating to free up a few tables, now that the bar is busier and they aren’t poring over laptop computers.

“Tell me, Enjolras,” Grantaire says, catching Enjolras by the elbow so he’s forced into the middle of their loud conversation without any segue, rather than being allowed to ease into it with grace, “what’s the vegan alternative to egging a racist?”

Enjolras gives it a second of contemplation. “Brick,” he says. Grantaire and Joly throw back their heads in laughter, almost knocking over Bossuet’s half-full drink again.

“I’ll drink to that,” Bahorel reaches across the table to pound Enjolras amicably on the back, which he feels in his bones. “If you get enough velocity even someone with your upper body strength could leave a serious dent!”

“Watch out Baz,” Muschietta says cheerfully, “his jailtime record is longer than yours!”

“Not for throwing bricks!” Bahorel says that like it’s a matter of principle. “For chaining himself to bannisters and judge’s cars and shit!”

“Didn’t you get a fine for throwing a beer can at a cop last year?” Enjolras asks.

“He was just littering,” Joly fishes ice out of his drink with his straw. “And the cop happened to be in the way.”

“These things happen,” Bahorel knocks back the rest of his drink and sets the glass on the table. “Feuilly, still want me to walk you to work?”

“I told you not to let me have a second drink,” Feuilly elbows his way to Enjolras’s side. “I have to work ‘til three, then be up by eight to meet you lot.”

“I don’t have any control over you. C’mon, we’ll walk it off. Night, homies,” Bahorel stands and pushes Feuilly by the shoulders and towards the door.

“Nine in the morning tomorrow!” Courfeyrac, now immersed in some conversation with Jehan and Eponine across the bar, shouts this at volume.

Without Bahorel’s presence the conversation ebbs. A few things become clear to Enjolras - Joly is exhausted. Muschietta is a little on edge. And Grantaire is drunk.

“I’m gonna go have a cigarette,” he says and stands up like he’s on the deck of a ship, weight on one foot than the next. “You all want another round when I’m done?”

“We’re just about leaving, honey,” Muschietta lets him steady himself on her shoulder.

“I’ll walk you out!” Bossuet volunteers.

“Every party has a pooper,” Grantaire singsongs this, weaving his way out of the circle of their chairs and towards the door. He pauses right behind Enjolras, who can’t see him but can feel how he almost leans against the back of Enjolras’s chair, but doesn’t. Grantaire is drunk, gone from loud to concise to almost belligerent as he went. But it’s close to disappointment anyway.

“You’re a dick!” Joly calls cheerfully.

“I’ll go with you,” Musichetta says to Bossuet.

“Nah, it’s fine. I just want to be sure he doesn’t fall down a manhole or something!”

“Sounds more like something you would do.”

“You can never be too careful - oh - “

In his motion to rise, Bossuet has upended his frequently threatened Negroni. It topples down his shirt, bright red and floral smelling. Enjolras blinks gin fumes out of his eye.

“Oh! Oh shit, oh my elbow,” Bossuet clutches his arm, and Muschietta and Joly both clutch each other in mirth. “Oh - Grantaire! Damn, he’s gone. Damn, this shirt was new! Damn - I was gonna finish that - “

“I’ll go,” Enjolras decides this swiftly, and he pushes away from the table to make the point. Bossuet is mopping drunkenly at his shirt, Joly too busy giggling in his shoulder to assist.

“No, no,” he says, “you don’t have to, don’t - “

“I don’t mind,” Enjolras says. “May mean I have half a chance of getting some sleep tonight, anyway.”

“If you’re sure - “

“Goodnight,” Enjolras says. “Nine tomorrow. Goodnight, everyone.” He waves to Combeferre, nods in Cosette’s direction, and steps outside into the night. The evening air is like a veil lifting.

He spots Grantaire because of the light of his cigarette, two doors down and not moving particularly fast. Enjolras crosses the distance in two or three strides. Grantaire’s puzzlement lingers longer because he’s drunk.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Grantaire says, which is pushing it a bit.

“I’ll walk you back,” Enjolras says.

“Take advantage of my inebriation to convert me!” Grantaire exclaims.

“If that was all it took,” Enjolras says, “you’d have been sitting at the head of a picket line for years.”

Grantaire laughs. Enjolras wasn’t sure if he would.

They walk in silence for a moment, until the corner that marks Grantaire’s apartment building comes into sight. From here, Enjolras is two train stops away. He’ll have to jog to catch it, or wait another half an hour.

Grantaire pushes past him towards the door but then stops and turns. In the grey night he looks like an enigmatic shadow.

“Nightcap?” He asks unsteadily, tossing the invitation over his shoulder as he meanders ahead and towards his apartment. “Coffee? More beer?”

It’s a strange request, one with an intention Enjolras can’t read. Grantaire fills space with the company of other people. Grantaire speaks in double meanings. They’ve certainly spent time together just the two of them - often by accident, usually barely acknowledged - but never like this.

“I wouldn’t mind a coffee,” Enjolras says, after a second, and he follows Grantaire to his front door and watches him fight with the key.

“You didn’t have to,” Grantaire says, finally getting the key into the lock and swinging his apartment door open. He lives in a little studio, two rooms, in the same building as Eponine and her siblings, two buildings down from Joly, Bossuet and Muschietta. Enjolras has been here a few times, mostly coming or going on his way to somewhere else. It has a kind of cluttered, eclectic energy he likes, but couldn’t live in all the time.

“Walk you home? I don’t mind,” Enjolras follows Grantaire in, taking the open door as an affirmation of the invitation to enter.

“Of course not,” Grantaire sloshes water into his ancient coffee-maker. “No cause too small for thy noble heart and golden ass.”

“That’s unnecessary.”

“Is it though?” Grantaire grins at him over his shoulder. Cheeky. It looks forced. “Apparently I need a chaperone. Am I gonna run off? I am more familiar with these city’s streets than the shape of the ceiling in mine own bedchamber, good sir, and will find a bed where my head ends up at the end of the day. Which is more than you can say for yourself.”

“Why’s that?” Enjolras is watching his increasingly complicated attempt to pour beans into the coffee pot. He’s beginning to think it’s a lost cause.

“Well, you’re here.”

Some significance, then, to Enjolras following him upstairs. He wants to ask what it is. He’s never before considered himself a coward.

“Will we see you tomorrow?” He asks instead, because it’s easy. It’s also the wrong thing to say, but he doesn’t realize that until it’s too late. Grantaire’s face contorts into a grin that’s downright disturbing.

“I shall be there will bells on,” he says, and begins to open cabinets and shove dishes around, looking for something. “Or perhaps with nothing on at all! It’s that kind of venture, right? I can certainly leap around in the nude and shout about rights and liberty and manifest destiny, if needed. Say the word! Give the order!”

“That won’t be necessary,” Enjolras says, trying to backpedal, “but when that moment arises I will let you know.”

“Just flag me down, yes. A true and practical use for me!”

Enjolras ignores this. “This is always the worst part,” he says, because he wants to say something honest. “The waiting. The older I get, the worse I get at waiting, and anticipation.”

“You’ve picked the wrong cause to saddle your horse to,” Grantaire says, not unkindly. “Cause you’re gonna be waiting for a long time for universal world peace.”

“I know you want me to say that’s a very typecast way to talk about what I believe in.”

“Isn’t it?” Grantaire waves, more accusatory.

“Well, no. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at it, were it to materialize. In one year or twenty or two hundred.”

“Until the next people in charge redefine what it means, or who gets it, or where the line is,” Grantaire’s mouth is turning in as his voice gets louder.

“I’m aware it’s an impossible scenario,” Enjolras says. “Which is exactly why I’m getting up tomorrow morning and not flipping a coin over it.”

“And that’s what it takes,” Grantaire repeats. “Just - getting up tomorrow. Not flipping a coin over it. God help us that catch wishes in our glasses and chuck our spare change into fountains just in case. I can’t help it. You’ve called me a pessimist but I’m also not dead.”

“Do you recommend it?” Enjolras asks. “There’s a fountain in the park near my apartment, anyway.”

“If it helped, do you think anybody would keep at it?” Grantaire’s mouth is growing smaller, his voice bigger. This is coming to a head, even in his efforts to divert it into something other than despair. Enjolras is uncomfortable with his own despair - a shadow, where he knows Grantaire’s is more like a sinkhole. He can feel the waters rising. He wishes he had a cigarette to offer, a bridge of recognition. But he doesn’t. “Throwing hope up against flypaper that God is waiting to tear down and stomp on?”

“I don’t think that’s the point of having hope at all,” Enjolras says, “but I also don’t think that’s what you mean. And I don’t think you’re a fly.”

“And I can’t help but ask what the point of it is,” Grantaire is still going, opening cabinets apparently at random, “of just doing it all again. Every day you just do it all again, and hope that something’s going to be different about it. And it never is - that’s the joke, and the punchline’s not funny. The whole business of living requires some buy-in that we all believe there’s something at the end of it all that’s gonna make it worth it. And is there? I haven’t seen it yet. I’m sure I don’t deserve to. If it doesn’t make you high or make you laugh or make you feel something - what’s the point?”

He’s probably not looking for an answer. If Enjolras doesn’t acknowledge this, he’ll probably move on to the next topic, opening cabinets and filling the air with whatever happens to cross his mind until he runs out of steam.

“The point is,” he says, feeling insubstantial and strange in Grantaire’s cluttered kitchen, crammed as it is with the ephemera of his life, “the point is, that there might be something different about it.”

Grantaire looks at him, his focus somehow laser-keen even though his hands seem unsteady.

“Yeah,” he says, finally, “and I guess that doesn’t have to be good, though.”

“No,” Enjolras says. “It just has to be something.”

They stare at each other. Grantaire’s eyes are red and agitated but they don’t move away. He needs words, a recognition of meaning or a promise or anything - anything at all, but they don’t come.

Grantaire opens his mouth.

Enjolras waits, and expects nothing and everything.

“I’m going to be sick, now,” Grantaire says with dignity.

He abandons the cabinets for the bathroom, leaving Enjolras standing by himself in the kitchen. Enjolras pours him some water, for something to do. He feels like he’s crossing a line when he steps through Grantaire’s cluttered bedroom to find him. The alternative, though, is leaving him alone - and he can’t. He steps over battered paperbacks, a guitar, rolls of paper and a discarded jean jacket, telling flotsam and jetsam. When Enjolras turns the light on the room feels smaller and less personal.

Grantaire is wretching into the toilet, somewhat halfheartedly.

“I brought you some water,” Enjolras says, in lieu of admitting he’d followed him. Grantaire turns his head to look at him, resting his cheek on his arm. “Here,” Enjolras follows up, and hands it over with force. It sloshes some onto the bathroom floor.

“Why are you - “ Grantaire says, vaguely. He waves his hand in Enjolras’s direction, not in dismissal so much as bewilderment. Like he’s trying to summarize his presence and can’t. “You don’t have to stay,” he continues. “I’m kind of old hat at this part of the evening.”

“I know.”

“I’m not gonna drop dead, you know,” Grantaire says, both cajoling and bitter.

There isn’t a correct response to that, so Enjolras doesn’t give one.

“If you came in here,” Grantaire says, “to tell me I’m wrong - I’m really not in the mood.” An echo, again, of their conversation from the other night. Upside down and backwards.

Enjolras wonders how it is that they’re always at cross-purposes, he and Grantaire.

They’ve run in circles as long as they’ve known each other, never quite meeting in the middle. For a long time, Enjolras thought it was a good thing, avoiding that space. Recently he’s not so sure.

It means something, to see somebody as they are. It isn’t always the same thing as understanding them.

“That’s not why I came in here,” Enjolras says.

“Then why did you?”

“I was going to ask you if you have a cigarette.”

Grantaire doesn’t laugh but he doesn’t look away, either, which is enough.

 

 

 

 

3.

 

 

 

Enjolras has been sitting on the chilly sidewalk long enough for his backside to grow numb. Hours - most of the day. He had spoken quite a bit, shouting into a megaphone first in the morning and then twice more until his voice all but gave out and he’d passed it off. It was long gone, working through their ranks and on to other people who had been invited, who’d just showed up. And for a good while he’d been sitting, and listening, and applauding, as the afternoon wore on.

Feuilly shows up for a while first thing in the morning, then leaves for a shift, then comes back. Cosette had brought her father by for a while. They count, a rough estimate, something upwards of a thousand people coming and going. A hundred of them stick it out, sitting on the chilly sidewalk as the afternoon grows on. Combeferre talks at length, surprising for him in a crowd of so many. Courfeyrac keeps everyone’s spirits up as the afternoon gets colder. Even Marius brings a sign and an ugly knitted sweater he claims at one point belonged to his dad, to keep warm. Grantaire doesn’t show up. Enjolras was torn between being certain he would and certain he wouldn’t. He’s absent as the day wears on and the crowd thins.

Enjolras finds that he’s second-guessing everything he said last night, everything he was told. It’s unkind, and he can’t help it. Tries hard not to let the thoughts articulate in his brain at all - pushing them down, unwanted, in favor of the work.

He ends up, somewhat unexpectedly, sitting with Eponine for most of the afternoon. He’s always liked her, but never quite knew where he stood with her - there was an invisible line, for a while, _your side or mine_ , and she’d always fallen solidly on Grantaire’s. That line seems to be loosening recently, and so she sits next to him and rolls her eyes occasionally like they’re sharing in a joke.

She’d probably have an answer, but it would reveal something to ask it - so he doesn’t, and passes the time updating the DSA Twitter account, and meeting her eye.

“Excuse me,” a voice behind them says, and he and Eponine both turn to see Grantaire, a hat pulled low over his face and his gloves on. He’s carrying a shopping bag full of something that steams in one hand. “Is this the meeting for Flat Earthers Anonymous?”

“You know this started hours ago right?” Jehan shoves at Grantaire’s shoulder in passing, somehow echoing what Enjolras is thinking.

“If I’d been here hours ago, I couldn’t be here now to bring this!” Grantaire hefts the shopping bag, pulling out styrofoam cups and a thermos. It’s apprehended by Feuilly as quickly as its appears, but a minute later someone puts a hot cup of coffee in Enjolras’s hands.

“You’ll have to do black, no sugar,” Combeferre says in his ear. “We couldn’t plan that far ahead, I’m afraid.”

“How far ahead is that?”

“Two hours, maybe.” The implication that Combeferre and Grantaire are in cahoots is kind of an unnerving one, even though Enjolras knows about their long-abandoned webseries from their college days.

“Took you long enough,” Eponine says in Grantaire’s direction. “Gavroche - get over here, would you?”

Eponine’s little brother - scrappy and skinny with his own hat pulled down over his hair like an emulation of Grantaire - dashes over. Grantaire must have brought him along. Eponine gestures along the crowded pathway with her chin.

“I have to take him back home,” she says apologetically. “Now that R’s here you can trade one body for another.”

“There’s no reason why your brother can’t stay,” Enjolras says.

“Except that he’s a bat out of hell.”

“I heard that!”

“Yeah, I know.” She snatches Gavroche’s hat off his head to ruffle his hair, then returns it. “A little while, I guess. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

“What are you doing anyway?” Gavroche makes a grab for Eponine’s cup of coffee, which she maneuvers out of the way, and then Grantaire’s, which smells suspiciously alcoholic.

“It’s called a sit-in,” Enjolras says. “We’re blocking anyone from getting in the door to the courthouse. It’s a form of civil disobedience.”

“Cool,” Gavroche says. “And what if that doesn’t work? Do you get un-civil? Maybe wreck some shit?”

“Well,” Enjolras starts, orienting his explanation in his head into something that could pass for Peaceful Protesting: A History, followed by How To Clean Pepper Spray From Your Eyes 101. He’s interrupted, though.

“Bahorel!” Gavroche shrieks, abandoning the previous conversation entirely to sprint down the line in Bahorel’s direction.

“Hey my buddy!” Bahorel says. Gavroche punches his bicep, and he throws one back, grinning.

“So much for that,” Eponine sighs. “Here was me thinking he might absorb some of your decorum and self-control or something. Even for a second.”

“I tried,” Enjolras says. “I had a Powerpoint presentation prepared and everything.”

“It’s alright,” Eponine slugs him on the shoulder too, for good measure. It hurts. She never looks like she’s got it in her, but she always does. “He’s uh - “

“Precocious?” Grantaire sips at his boozy coffee and grins.

“Thanks for keeping an eye on him,” Eponine says, giving Enjolras a look over Grantaire’s shoulder. “He can hang out here for a bit now that we’re just waiting it out, it won’t hurt.”

“Yeah no problem,” Grantaire says. “We ate marshmallow crunch for breakfast and did somersaults off of the balcony.”

“And he finished his English essay?”

“Even edited it.”

“Watch out,” Eponine’s expression is almost affectionate. “You might actually be a good influence.”

“Oh don’t worry, that’s what Bahorel’s for,” Grantaire is grinning sheepishly. “Also I give him very honest answers when he asks about how many drugs I used to do.”

“Dick.”

“Your brother’s trying to climb into a trashcan.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake - “ and she’s gone, stomping off through the crowd in her beat-up Docs. An imposing figure despite her height, especially for little brothers. That leaves the two of them, and the crowd, and the worsening chill. Grantaire pulls his hat down over his ears more firmly.

“It’s cold as balls out here,” he says. “Has it been like that all day?”

“The sun was out this morning, when there were more people here.”

“Did you win?” Grantaire looks sly.

“You said something the other night about knowing when you’re being an asshole.” He likes acknowledging the fact that he remembers how Grantaire said it.

Grantaire shakes his head, his eyes creasing. “I guess I did.”

“It’s done what we intended it to do, which I’d consider a success” Enjolras says. “Thanks for asking.”

“Good, cause you might actually think this is funny - can you hold this?” Grantaire passes his styrofoam cup to Enjolras, who takes it and stacks it inside his empty one. It’s half-full and still hot, with a whiskey kick in the smell that’s pleasant because the air is cold. “Babysitting a pre-teen’s English essay wasn’t all we did this morning. Don’t tell Eponine.”

“Since when do you babysit?”

“Since, like, forever. That kid needs a handler more than a sitter, but we get along. Here.” Grantaire pulls something up on his phone - a photo. He angles the screen in Enjolras’s direction. Even so, Enjolras has to bend his head down a little to see it.

It’s a photograph of a wall - brick, and probably not far from where they are. There’s something splashed across it in blue and green spray paint. It takes a moment for his eyes to pick out the words, in huge and jagged letters.

SUCK DICKS, it says, at least two feet high, THROW BRICKS.

“Just in case,” Grantaire says, “anybody needs to remember the reason for the season.” He’s waiting for some kind of response, looking up at Enjolras through the steam from the coffee cup. They’re standing side by side in a crowd of a few hundred, and they might as well be the only people in the world.

Enjolras can’t help it. He starts laughing.

 

 

4.  

 

 

 

Late into the night and they all end up, somehow, in Enjolras and Combeferre's apartment. A first stop on a line of many, and Joly has already gone looking through Enjolras's somewhat curated wine collection, and Combeferre's less dignified tequila stash. There are toasts. There is laughter. Somebody puts on Bruce Springsteen. This moment is Courfeyrac's scene and Enjolras stands to the side to let him lead it. He's said and done what he can, for the day. The room, full of light and sound, stands against anything outside it, whatever response they have to prepare for. There is something magical to be said for standing still in a room full of people you trust inside out and backwards. 

Living isn't worth doing without loving, Enjolras thinks. That's right down at the bottom of everything - the commitment to a love so big it's more important than anything else might be. It's hard, and it's work - and this is the reminder of why, and of when it's easy.

Bahorel and Jehan are resolutely lining up tequila shots on the kitchen island. Feuilly is taking photos - had been all day. Cosette is sitting on the counter with her arm around Grantaire's shoulders - they're belting out the Springsteen song. Combeferre and Courfeyrac are attempting to organize people towards the exit. 

It's easy to love them. It always reminds him of what it feels like, when it's harder. 

"I brought you a wine cooler," Grantaire says, behind him. It surprises him - Enjolras hadn't noticed him crossing the room. 

"Fuck off." Enjolras takes it anyway, even though he doesn't really want it. "Thanks." 

"Yeah," Grantaire leans his hip against the counter and makes no move to leave even though everyone else is moving towards the exit and someone is calling his name. He waves cheerfully over his shoulder and doesn't follow. "I think the party's moving to the bar," Grantaire says. "Jehan's cried once already. I'll probably end up trying to stand on my hands. That kind of night. I'll walk with you, if you want." 

"I know you don't have to try to stand on your hands," Enjolras says. "I'll go in a minute. It's been a long day." 

"Better than the other one, right?"

"Yes." There will be something else. There is always something else.

"Well," Grantaire shrugs. "The bar's not going anywhere. At least in my experience." 

"Neither is the celebration," Enjolras says. 

 

"Those come and go. I've found it's best to enjoy them when they do." 

Love is at the bottom of everything, Enjolras thinks. You don't have to understand somebody to love them. You just have to want to. 

The room begins to empty, their friends pouring out the door and onto the street. And Enjolras feels like he's come to a decision. Combeferre is waving at him across the room to get his attention. He shakes his head, and Combeferre gets the hint with a raise of one eyebrow. 

"Are they expecting you?" Enjolras asks. "Or do you mind staying here, for a minute? I want to talk to you." 

"Just a beer with my name on it," Grantaire says. "But those come and go too. I'm sure Bossuet and Joly will shoulder their disappointment with dignity." 

Eponine leaves the apartment last. She gives them both a look, then shuts it behind her.

"What is it?" Grantaire's voice is aloof. "Or should I say - what did I do to warrant an official summons?" 

Enjolras is suddenly aware that they are very alone in his apartment, together. He has no clear plan for this, just the desire, and he's overwhelmed with the thought that it's truly a bad idea. Grantaire shifts, so they're farther apart. That feels intentional and Enjolras is good at many things, great at a few, always willing to learn, but he is outclassed and unprepared at the concept of this battle. 

But tactics are the same - and honesty wins. 

He takes a steadying breath and sets the glass of wine out of the way.  

Grantaire beats him to it, which he should have expected. He's looking at Enjolras bemusedly. He'd been expecting something concise and business-related. "What is it I can do to assist with the Unholy Army of Optimism and Localvores?" 

Enjolras is suddenly tense, suddenly at a loss. "I'm not," he blurts.

"Unholy? I should say that's implied. Someone's clearly on your side, at least when it comes to hair texture. Unfortunately, my mere presence damns the lot of you. To speak nothing of Jehan, who does collect rat skeletons."

"I'm not really an optimist," Enjolras says, jumping gratefully onto the proffered branch of conversation. An in, an out. He could change his mind. The prospect is terrifying. "An idealist by any other name is a man with his eyes closed. I see things as they are, or I try to. I try pretty hard." 

"That's the trouble," Grantaire says, following this abrupt change in direction with relative ease, like a man on a canoe, "with trying to put labels on anything. It always comes back around to something you're not. People are defined by the things they stand in opposition to." 

"Speak for yourself," Enjolras says, smiling. "I know exactly what I am." 

"I've always liked that about you," Grantaire says, and then looks away, fast. 

"You don't think it goes the other way, too?" 

"People are defined by the things they stand in opposition to," Grantaire repeats. "Philosophically, I'm a Nihilist. Chemically, I'm depressed. Politically, I'm unengaged and religiously, I'm fucked. In the grand scheme of things that makes me a cynic." 

"Politics are just logistics," Enjolras says. "Nothing about what you just said accounts for standing around in the dark." 

"Why the fuck would you say that?" Grantaire's grinning because he doesn't know where this is going

“Because you’re a self-diagnosed cynic,” Enjolras says, “and you aren’t seeing what’s right in front of your face.”

“Maybe you better tell me,” Grantaire is still laughing, still mocking. A deflection.

“Me,” Enjolras says it as honestly as he can.

"You?" Grantaire's eyebrows are in danger of vanishing into his hairline entirely. 

"Yes," Enjolras says. "And you. And what's been sitting in between us for a while. I know it's not in my head." 

Grantaire goes completely still. He stares - his mouth open in a moment of suspended shock.

"You're fucking with me," he says. His eyes are huge. 

"I'm not." 

"Then you're lying."

"I'm not doing that either." 

"What kind of point are you trying to prove, exactly?" Grantaire's voice is brittle now. 

"I'm not trying to prove anything," Enjolras says quickly. This isn't what he expected, exactly. "I'm asking you a question. I'm - giving you an overture." 

"An  _overture?"_ Grantaire's face does acrobatics. "Have you met me? Like, ever?" 

"Clearly!" 

“You - “ Enjolras might be imagining how his voice is unsteady and strange. There’s a rushing sound in his ears that’s making it hard to concentrate on anything but the way he can see Grantaire’s tongue pressing against the back of his teeth, or his eyelashes, or the wrinkle in between his brows. “You’re gonna smack me on the shoulder for crossing a line, and storm off?”

“No!” Enjolras does smack him on the shoulder. The contact means something - and Grantaire’s eyes follow his hand. It isn’t what he means though. “You’re not listening to me.”

“That’s not true,” Grantaire says. “I’m not following a word of what you’re saying, is what’s happening.”

“Then follow me!” Enjolras snaps. “Because I’m here, and I’m telling you what I've been thinking for weeks, and you're asking me if you've crossed a line!" 

“Why are you yelling?” Grantaire sounds alarmed, or amused.

“Because you’re being frustrating!” Enjolras doesn’t understand how Grantaire is this purposefully obtuse. An act - if he’s read this wrong, if he’s uncertain.

“I thought you said you wanted to - “ Bewilderment. Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s got it all backwards.

“Both of those things can be true, Grantaire.”

“You’re - not - “ Grantaire falters, the frenetic argument falling out of his voice. “You’re trying to communicate a real and serious fact right now, aren’t you?”

“You thought I wasn’t?”

“Well - “ Grantaire looks around the quiet kitchen like he’s expecting some kind of interruption or reprieve. " _Why?"_

“Well,” Enjolras says, and he knows his voice doesn’t stay steady as he does, “you keep surprising me. I thought I’d repay the favor.”

“Oh!” Grantaire’s hands are all over the place - running through his hair, up and down his arms, tearing at the fraying corner of his jeans. “Yeah, well. Mission accomplished, very good, great job. Your work here is done, I absolutely didn’t expect you - that - what - whatever - “

He seems to run out of words. His jaw works, helplessly, and his eyes track Enjolras’s face like a beacon.

“I hope it was alright,” Enjolras says, which feels silly. Grantaire makes a sound like he’s being strangled, for a second.

“You hope - “ he starts, which seems like an odd thing to get hung up, but then, “Alright?”

“Is it?” Enjolras asks. Because he has to know. He never knows where he sits with Grantaire, who is staring at him now with perfect stillness, his hands holding his own elbows. Enjolras feels nervous. Enjolras feels like he’ll fall into the panicked rhythm of his own heart and vanish.

“Just - just,” Grantaire opens his mouth, closes it. “Let me, just - I mean, I should go, I don’t know, take a shower or brush my teeth or - you’re seriously going to do this right now? Right here? You couldn’t, I don’t know, write me a memo? A calendar invite? A formal summons? So I had a little time to wrap my head around whatever - what - why are you looking at me like that?”

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, and smiles, and says what he’s always wanted to say, “I’m going to tell you something.”

“What?” Grantaire’s voice is almost inaudible, his words gone again.

Enjolras puts a hand on Grantaire’s hand, over his own elbow. Moves them both, so he’s pressing both of Grantaire’s hands - bitten nails, one scarred knuckle, fading ink on four fingers and something new and crisp and black inked into the soft part of one thumb - right over his heart. His eyes are huge. Enjolras feels the weight of them on him like a kind of promise. Somehow he’s still smiling.

He’s never considered himself a coward. It’s nice to have opportunities to prove it.

“Shut up,” Enjolras says, and Grantaire starts laughing, and before he can stop Enjolras kisses him.

Enjolras kisses him and - Enjolras is kissed.

Enjolras has been kissed before, sure, some fine and some mediocre and one truly, tremendously bad. But he’s never been kissed like this. Grantaire is glacial until he’s not, and Enjolras can almost feel him holding his breath until the moment when he lets it go.

There’s his body, and there’s Grantaire’s body, and here’s the place where they can find some middle ground.

He couldn’t have imagined what that feels like. Even with his eyes closed, he can feel the crease in Grantaire’s brow, the sudden serious attention in his hands. There will never be enough of this. He feels like he’s drowning in realizations, a flood of them like the arc of an argument suddenly sharpened in focus and all his wants - with certainty - is to be closer. There’s a line to be crossed and he ignores it. He’s never been one to follow rules.

It’s Grantaire who pulls back, and any distance is suddenly an imposition. Enjolras can’t understand how he never realized what an imposition it is. Their foreheads touch. Through his own eyelashes, Enjolras can see that Grantaire’s eyes are closed. His face from this angle is a wild portrait.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, and Grantaire winces like that hurts, and then he smiles.

“I’m still here,” he says. “You haven’t killed me yet.”

“Not that kind of surprise.” Enjolras barely recognizes his own voice. “That was - “

There isn’t a word, none of them have any meaning any longer. He’ll have to invent a new language to describe this.

Grantaire doesn’t look at him. He takes Enjolras’s hand - still clinging to his shirt - in his own. Enjolras watches him. He kisses his palm. His eyelashes betray the movement of his eyes. Everything is happening so slowly, and too fast.

“You’re alright?” Enjolras asks, which is so monumentally underwhelming a thing to say.

“You’re gonna ask that question, after kissing me like that,” Grantaire’s voice is panic, or wonder. “Are you? You’re the one who’s decided to fly completely out of his mind for this - “

“I’m not,” Enjolras says, because he needs Grantaire to understand. He should work on certainty, but he feels like he’s been waiting for this for longer than he thought was possible. He knows, in a vague way, that Grantaire has been waiting twice as long. So he chooses action over clarity. “Listen to me,” he says. “What I’m thinking has never been more clear.”

“You’re the only person I know who I might trust to really believe that,” Grantaire says slowly. He’s still holding Enjolras’s hand. “Even if I don’t.”

“Will you ask me what it is, then? That I’m thinking?” Enjolras puts his free hand to Grantaire’s neck, where his pulse is unsteady. He touches his bottom lip with his thumb.

“I can’t,” Grantaire says, and the hard line of his teeth against Enjolras’s thumb is electric. “Let it wait until whatever happens next is over.”

That’s a surprise. Again. And always. And then Grantaire kisses him again.

“Can we just - “ Grantaire’s voice is fragile, and Enjolras wants to memorize the sound, “We don’t have to - to - anything. I just - I can’t sit here and talk about it if this is really - “

“Alright,” Enjolras says, and he says it a second time without any sound against the sharp edge of Grantaire’s jaw. “I do, I want - “

He doesn’t know the specifics of what he was going to say. They’re not important. For a moment, perfectly, they understand each other.

 

 

 

5.

 

 

 

Two in the morning. Maybe earlier, or later - but the light has the quality of diffused clarity that indicates early morning ambiguity. He had fallen asleep, and now Enjolras is aware that somebody is watching him.

It’s Grantaire, who is watching him. His eyes are hooded and his hair is all over the place, from the pressure of Enjolras’s pillow. His arm is under Enjolras’s ear. He catalogs these facts: his pillow, his ear, Grantaire’s hair, Grantaire’s eyes. Grantaire breathes and he feels it happen.

“You stare very loudly,” Enjolras says without thinking.

“Your bedhead,” Grantaire says, “is magnificent. Not sexy at all.”

Enjolras touches his hair self-consciously. It is all over the place, longer than he usually keeps it. Grantaire pushes it behind his ear.

“What time is it?”

“No idea.”

“Did you sleep?”

“No,” Grantaire looks scornful for a second. “Well, you were on my arm the whole time. So.”

“Oh.” Enjolras pushes himself up and off of it. Grantaire flexes his hand, and Enjolras gets phantom tingles as he imagines the blood rushing through capillaries. “You could have asked me to move.”

“I could have.” Grantaire is still staring. Wide-eyed. He looks spooked.

“You should have.” Enjolras is aware of his bare shoulders, his hair, the crusts in his eyes. “I’ll make coffee,” he suggests. “We should probably - “

“Yeah,” Grantaire says.

Enjolras stands, in the early morning chill. He finds a pair of leggings and, after a second of consideration, Grantaire’s shirt. It’s laying where it was discarded hours before, across the back of Enjolras’s bedroom office chair. Flannel, and soft and warm on the insides of his arms as he crosses into the kitchen to start the coffee maker.

The morning is deadly silent. If Combeferre had come back in the night, there’s no sign of him. Somewhat awkwardly, Enjolras checks his phone - almost drained of battery and still resting on his kitchen island. “I haven’t heard from you,” the text message says, “so I’ll assume you’re otherwise occupied. Come round to Courf’s in the morning if it doesn’t go well.”

He thanks the universe, and impulsive action, and Combeferre’s ability to combine brutality with tact.

The coffee maker beeps. He picks a coffee mug at random and pours.

He comes back into the room to find the bed is empty, and the window that leads out onto the little fire escape is open. Cold air is coming in, the clear chill of something that isn’t yet morning but doesn’t want to cling to night.

“Grantaire?” Enjolras asks, and he refuses to be struck with panic or irrationality.

“I’m here,” Grantaire says, from the fire escape. His voice is caught by the air and torn.

Enjolras pushes the curtain back. Grantaire is sitting, shirtless, with a cigarette between his fingers. His back is turned away from Enjolras and the curve of his shoulder blade, decorated with black ink and something abstract and orange, is protective. Broken down into their parts, bodies are nothing more than symbols for something larger.

“I made coffee. You drink it black, right?” He pushes the cup through the window. Grantaire takes it mechanically, then seems to use it as an ashtray.

“Isn’t it cold out there?” Enjolras asks.

“Yeah,” Grantaire says.

“Can I come out?”

“No. It’s cold.”

“You just - “ You’d be warmer if I gave you back your shirt, Enjolras thinks. Because I’m wearing it. It’s worn where your elbows have rubbed into the fabric, and it’s too short at the wrists, and the turned-up collar has a splotch of green paint ground into the weave. And taking it off would be an imposition.

“I just need,” Grantaire says, “two minutes to freak out. Okay?”

“Wait - “ Enjolras’s brain unsticks from the shirt. “Why?”

“I am begging you for two minutes alone,” Grantaire’s voice sounds strangled.

“Alright,” Enjolras says, because there isn’t anything else to say. “But after two minutes, I’m going to come out there to make sure you haven’t jumped off.”

“Alright,” Grantaire says, “fine,” and there’s hysteria, or maybe amusement in his voice. Enjolras goes into the kitchen.

Two minutes feel like an ice age. He checks his email account 35 times, and then he stares at the refrigerator. Combeferre started a grocery list the day before last. “Almond milk,” it says. “Ink cartridges. Courf’s birthday present. Abolish ICE.”

He lets an extra minute go by, just in case.

“Why does your coffee mug have a guillotine on it?” Grantaire says.  
  
“I like to be clear about what I think,” Enjolras says. “That doesn’t leave room for ambiguity.”

Grantaire makes a strangled sound, around his cigarette.

“We have to talk about this,” Enjolras says. “Where we both stand. So we’re on the same page.”

“Please,” Grantaire says, “We could just have sex again, instead?” Something hopeful, and also terrified.

“I’m not ruling that out,” Enjolras says, “but we have to talk about it.”

“I’ll go back through the window and lock you out.”

“No you won’t."

“I will, so don’t try me - “

“I have feelings for you,” Enjolras blurts. Grantaire does not dive through the window. The line between his brows deepens. Enjolras wants to touch it with his thumb.

“If you don’t say it,” Grantaire says, finally, “it makes it less weird. Okay?”

“Do you want me to write it down?” He feels sick, but also confident in his purpose. This is just another uncomfortable truth. He’s sitting with it, letting it sink in to his being. Believing it so surely and completely.

“Can we just have sex again?”

“I’ll put it in emojis so you’ll understand it.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“So clearly,” Enjolras says, “you’ve got feelings for and about me, and all of this - “

“Is this some kind of - “ Grantaire extinguishes his cigarette butt on the railing of the fire escape, then lights another one vindictively, “awful foreplay for you? You’re into this? You get off on embarrassing others?”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Enjolras says.

“If I’d known this was what you’re into I’d have never fallen for you.”

“Got you” Enjolras exclaims, and Grantaire freezes, his face in a rictus of horror and despair.

“You walked me right into that one,” he says, “you bastard.”

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, for the joy of saying his name.

“You’re acting like this isn’t a surprise, for you. Both ways. You, and me - “

“Isn’t it?”

“Is it not? You’re - you. And I. It’s been years, Enjolras. For me.”

Enjolras does know that. Always conceptually, but now he’s beginning to realize what that means. Grantaire’s fingers, around his cigarette, tremble. Here’s an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Here’s the impossible compromise - that nobody is right, and that both sides have to see from a new angle.

He takes Grantaire’s hand. He takes the cigarette out of it, and crushes it on the railing, and he doesn’t let go of Grantaire’s cold fingers even when they tremble.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire does. That’s a surprise.

“If you did this,” he says, “because it was a good day, and you won, and I was there. If you did this because you needed a new project, or a distraction, or because - God forbid - you knocked something off your list and you were bored - I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t think I could stomach it. And I need you to tell me. I would have taken anything, in any way - once. But today - “

He runs out of words. The world tips towards morning.

“I didn’t sleep with you because I was _bored_ ,” Enjolras says, affronted. He’s not sure if he should be offended or relieved. “I haven’t been bored in, like, seven years. Don’t be obtuse.”

“Seven whole years?”

“I’ve got a to-do list the length of my arm to occupy my time with,” Enjolras snaps, “and I’m doing - this. That’s not how I meant that at all.”

“I’m not sure if I’m fascinated or horrified by this hole you’re burying me in.”

“And you’re not listening to me.”

“Of course I am.” Grantaire turns away from him to stare over the edge of the fire escape. “I always am.”

“Grantaire.” Enjolras feels the absence of his attention so completely. He reacts without thought - and puts his hand right in Grantaire’s face. Alarmed, Grantaire just looks cross-eyed at him. “Have you, in the time we’ve known each other, ever known me to do something on a whim or for fun without exhaustively considering the consequences first?”

“You ate an ice cream cone last week,” Grantaire’s voice is muffled. “And I know you’re lactose intolerant.”

“It was a vegan ice cream cone.”

Grantaire stares at him through the gaps in his own fingers. “What are the consequences of this, then?” He asks, bravado gone.

“Probably a few headaches,” Enjolras says, “but I’ve taken those into account.”

“If you did a cost-benefit analysis I will leap off this balcony.”

“It’s on Combeferre’s hard-drive. It’s expansive,” he says, deadpan.

“And what did you decide is the most likely outcome?”

Enjolras removes his hand. He smiles. “No spoilers,” he says.

The expression on Grantaire’s face hurts, in a good way. Somewhere deep underneath everything else. He doesn’t ask, and Enjolras doesn’t say it. They meet in the middle, and the kiss exchanges urgency for sincerity. It goes on for a long time. Enjolras thinks he could stay here on this balcony until the sun comes up and his toes freeze off, to kiss Grantaire.

“You’re sure,” Grantaire interrupts himself, speaks into the corner of Enjolras’s mouth, “that conclusion isn’t that we’re going to strangle each other in a fit of intense, erotic fury?”

Enjolras finds he’s a lot more interested in listening to bullshit when it’s being said against his mouth like this.

“Okay,” Enjolras says. “Alright.” For some reason that does it - and he knows, with purpose and certainty, that he’s sure.

“It’s cold out here,” Grantaire says, mapping the expression on Enjolras’s face. It’s interesting to observe being observed. It warrants further exploration.

“Want to go back to bed?”

“After you,” Grantaire says, and follows Enjolras back inside. His shoulders are cold against Enjolras’s hands, and his mouth is warm.

 

 

 

 6.

 

 

 

 

The second time, it feels a little more natural - to lie there and watch Grantaire watching him. As with most things, you get better at practice.

“I can feel you thinking,” Enjolras says, because it’s late, or early, and they’re here. “Is it worth sharing? It better be about breakfast.”

“Capitalism,” Grantaire says, deadpan. He’s removed his shirt from Enjolras’s shoulders.

“You animal."

“Karl Marx.”

“Don’t get my hopes up.”

“You can just pretend I’m Karl, if you like.”

“You know Marx doesn’t actually do anything for me,” Enjolras can’t resist it even though he should. “That would be counterproductive. How would I get anything done?”

“With great passion,” Grantaire says. “Like you do everything.”

“Get out of this bed.” Grantaire moves to throw the blanket back. “No, don’t, alright - I give in.”

He lays back down, facing Enjolras this time. There’s a line of text tattooed on his collarbone and Enjolras touches it with his finger.

“So,” Grantaire says half into the pillow, “on a scale of one to ten, with ten being a scenario where America institutes a radical socialist system and I conspire with my long-dead forefathers to bring back the Bund - “

“Are you sure you want to set the bar that high?” Enjolras knows he’s grinning - the kind of intense and maniacal one that often results in Cosette gently telling him to tone it down a notch or two. He doesn’t stop it.

“Yes,” Grantaire says. “I do. I’m related to a lot of radical Yids. You would have liked them. You said you’d tell me where I stand.”

“Six and a half.”

“So - on a normal scale - “

Enjolras kisses him.

“Okay,” Grantaire says, muffled, “but were you thinking about socialism? Just then? And also before?”

“I guess not, no.”

“But I can guarantee that when you’re busy being a socialist now, sometimes you will be thinking about sex with me.”

“I’m always thinking about - “

“I know.”

There’s an eternity of promise in that statement - being known by someone you don’t expect. Enjolras is used to being understood, in loose terms and broad strokes. But being known is something bone-deep. One can be easily confused for the other.

“Maybe you do,” Enjolras says. He traces the line of Grantaire’s ear, his jaw, his Adam’s apple. “And you also know I’m not really - “

“I’m just playing Devil’s advocate - “

Enjolras kisses him. It’s an effective method, he finds, to end that kind of argument. He has no idea why he didn’t try it sooner.

 

 

 

  
7.

 

 

 

They leave the house eventually - because you can’t stay in bed all day without breakfast, and Grantaire knows a cafe around the corner Enjolras has never been to. Of course he does. It’s perfect - tucked away and not busy, even though now the sun is up, and there are tables outside facing the street. They look at each other across an elbow-crowded table with the sun up.

There are shadows under Grantaire’s eyes and he has to shave - he always has to shave, it seems - and he’s squinting into the sun like he’s suspicious of it. Enjolras feels a sense of certainty that only comes from a difficult job done well. He thinks he’s done this right. They’re here, after all, and Grantaire touches his hand with his fingers as he passes his coffee over.

He fights against the impulse to begin a running list - text Combeferre back, make some calls, finish that article, at least fifteen papers to grade - and options to just absorb the morning. People pass them and don’t look their way. They see nothing different from any other day, just two people sitting across from each other in the sun in the morning.

But everything is different.

Enjolras ponders the logistics of this change for a while - there isn’t a guidebook for how to make an ambiguous personal change known to a large number of very close friends. Clearing his throat in a room full of them and just saying it feels impossible. An email feels impersonal.

“Write a memo,” Grantaire says, smiling sideways. “From the desk of Mr. Enjolras. If it’s official enough maybe somebody will believe you.”

“I was under the implication that some people may have seen this coming,” Enjolras says carefully. Grantaire snorts.

“That’s because the rest of you are optimists,” he says, and Enjolras sticks a finger into the foam of his cappuccino in retaliation. It’s bitter on his tongue, but not in a bad way.

They watch the pedestrians pass them for a while, in silence.

“I can feel you thinking,” Enjolras says, eventually.

“Don’t mind me,” Grantaire sips his coffee. It does interesting things to his throat. “I’m trying to reconcile some things.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“All this - “ Grantaire sweeps an arm at the street, “and - you.”

“I’m part of it,” Enjolras says. “You know that.”

“That’s the problem. Think they’ll get mad if I smoke in here?”

“Grantaire.”

“You don’t wanna hear this.”

“I’m asking, so I do.” Enjolras takes his hand across the table.

“That’s what - that. This, and everything else. I’m looking at you - sitting here with me, and everything else. I haven’t sat at this table before, but I’ve spent a lot of time at a lot of other tables at cafes and I recognize the people walking by us.”

Enjolras knows Grantaire seems to know everyone in town, but that’s probably an exaggeration.

“All these people - going through the same routine yesterday as today, awful and soul-sucking, and they’re all thinking they should make a change in their lives. Save the planet! Call their mother! Go buy a gun! But they don’t. The ones that do just make things worse, but the vast majority of people in the world just push those things down and they do the same thing they did the day before. Making the world a little worse a little bit at a time because they don’t change, or think, or turn around and look. So they’re just walking on their way, and they’re looking at us thinking the same thing. Well, maybe not you. They’re wondering why you’re sitting here with me. But you are.”

He shuts his mouth suddenly, and looks away.

The inner lives of people are all individual and strange, and also all the same somehow. That’s what Enjolras thinks as he looks at him. Everyone wants something. Himself, he wants so many things he sometimes feels overwhelmed by them. When he was young, he thought it was easier to separate the personal from the bigger picture. Now, he knows that’s impossible.

“That is a problem,” he says.

“You don’t have a light, do you? Mine is probably in your couch somewhere.” Grantaire is digging through his shirt, and doesn’t look at him. His hair is dark in the sunlight, the crown of his head a spiral.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Enjolras says, and he produces Grantaire’s lighter from his pocket. “Because, well, here we are.”

Grantaire gawks at him, but recovers himself. “The exception doesn’t prove the rule, Enjolras. I don’t know if I can reconcile what I know with - with you, and how your hair looks in the sunlight. I don’t think I want to.”

Enjolras doesn’t know half of what Grantaire says is absolute bullshit, when the other half sounds like that.  

“You’re saying,” Enjolras holds the lighter out of his grip for a second, “that everyone around us - in this city, on this planet - won’t fight against their impulse to accept what’s easy over what’s brave, what’s safe over what’s scary, what’s understood over what’s revolutionary? Regardless of the outcome or the justification?

“Yeah.” Grantaire scowls a little, his cigarette hanging in the air over their table like a question. He probably shouldn’t smoke out here.

“I’m saying that maybe they will,” Enjolras says, and smiles, and lights Grantaire’s cigarette.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> as always i am evepolastried dot tumblr dot death. if you tell me what you thought to my face i will jump out a window. if you don't, i'll probably also jump out a window.


End file.
